Messiah (39 page)

Read Messiah Online

Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Messiah
3.97Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
She met him as a fellow traveler in Mosasa’s band and grew to see him as just another pious idiot. Initially she saw it as a pose, the same sort of hypocrisy that she saw in all ostentatiously religious people, the sort who advertise their faith out of some need for social or psychological advantage, or who needed an excuse to do what they would do anyway.
But he wasn’t like that, especially since the brunt of his theological excoriation was borne solely by himself. The self-pity was infuriating, but a mark of a sincerity that she’d never seen before, in anyone. And he wasn’t a static dogmatist either; she could see him trying to understand, trying to reconcile himself to the upended world they found themselves in. She could see him trying to figure out what was right, even when his religion failed him.
He gave her an anchor in the midst of the chaos, one she could not let go. She knew why she wanted to fight Adam; because she knew that Nickolai would never submit, and she would not continue in a universe without him.
Very quietly, she whispered into his chest, “Thank you.”
 
When Lubikov returned, he took the four of them and the canine monk Lazarus. Three of the Goliaths followed along with five more conventionally armored soldiers, making Lubikov’s warning against any attempted escape somewhat redundant.
They walked down a complicated set of tunnels, Lazarus leading the way. The deeper they went, the less natural the stone walls became. In places, Kugara began to discern sharp angles and surfaces too flat, tunnels too straight.
After the first hour or so of walking deeper under the mountain, Dörner called out that she saw something. Under the glare from the Goliath’s spotlight, she ran to one of the sections of wall too flat for nature.
The patch of wall was covered with carvings almost too faint to see, the spotlight’s glare deepened the shadows to the point where the worn scratches in the rock were visible. The cuneiform knotwork of the Dolbrian script was unmistakable—triangles within triangles. She touched the surface and said, “This is the real thing.”
“Can you read it?” Kugara asked.
“Give me a moment.”
Lubikov turned around and said, “Move it. We aren’t sightseeing here.”
“This could be important,” Dörner called back toward him.
“Do I need to remind you that is not your decision?”
Dörner started to say something, but Brody patted her on the shoulder and said, “Let’s keep going.”
They sighed and resumed marching down the tunnel. After a few minutes, Lazarus said, “That was a position marker. The numbers there refer to a complex coordinate system, angular measures of where we were in relation to the center of the planet, where the planet was in relation to Kropotkin, where Kropotkin was in relation to the center of the galaxy at the time they carved it.”
It marked more than that.
It marked the point where a hundred million years began to fade away. After they passed that patch of naked Dolbrian writing, the character of the tunnel began to change. The artificial flatness and angular nature of it was no longer hinted at beneath layers of rock, and even the floor evened out until the irregularities in the surface became a ribbed stairway. The walls flattened around them until the tunnel became a pentagonal prism. The carvings deepened, covering every surface now.
Kugara had no idea that anything of the Dolbrians had survived so intact. Where they walked now seemed less than a hundred years old, much less a hundred million.
Something covered the walls down here, a transparent coating that gave off a subtle sheen when the Goliaths’ spotlights traversed it. When Kugara touched it, it felt as smooth as glass, even over the carvings. Her fingers seemed to float a hair’s breadth over the surface.
The deeper they walked, the more age seemed to fall from the walls, the carvings acquired color beneath their protective shell; reds and golds buried in the depths of each line cut into the rock, bleeding outward as they descended, joined by silvers and blues, until they were wrapped in a multicolored universe of looping triangular patterns.
Dörner and Brody stared wide-eyed at the display, but the soldiers wouldn’t allow them time to gawk, pushing them forward every time they slowed. Lazarus offered no more explanations, and Lubikov kept picking up the pace.
Kugara held no more doubts that there was something down here. Where they walked held no resemblance to a natural cavern anymore. The edges of the bottom-heavy pentagon were knife-edge sharp now, the floor flat and sloping down now at a forty-five-degree angle, making the ribs every half meter necessary to avoid tumbling forward.
Necessary for those without armor, anyway. All the normal powered suits with them had gyroscopic stabilization aiding them, and the Goliaths, which barely fit and had to follow them down single file, had a center of gravity so low that they probably would have to make a conscious effort to trip.
They reached the end of the corridor where the walls disappeared and the floor flattened out beyond a darkened doorway. Kugara could sense a massive chamber beyond even before Lubikov and Lazarus disappeared into the darkness. They followed, and she could hear Nickolai’s sharp intake of breath before the Goliaths walked in with their spotlights.
When the chamber was illuminated, she felt her breath catch as well.
Where they had entered, the ceiling was barely above the top of the Goliaths’ armor, but it sloped up, and up, and up, until it met five other massive slabs of rock a hundred meters overhead. She looked up at the underside of a massive five-sided pyramid. Each face was crowded with Dolbrian writing, not only the triangular script, but concentric circles, ellipses, dots. Thousands of circular symbols spread across the ceiling in a gigantic star map.
Above them, the circled dots varied in size, and their color ranged from white-blue, through yellow, to orange-red. If she had to guess, the pride of place at the tip of the pyramid would go to Kropotkin, Bakunin’s star.
The Dolbrians’ place in human history was assured, not just by the planets they terraformed, but because of star maps like this one. Just fragmentary pieces of star maps like this one spurred the golden age of human colonization during the Confederacy—shards covering at most ten light-years had been hoarded as leads to more terraformed planets, more wealth, more political power.
The value of such things had declined with the demise of the Confederacy, as controlling actual planets meant more to internal stability than finding new ones. But still this artifact was priceless in most ways Kugara knew how to assign value to it.
“This is what the monastery was set up to protect,” Nickolai whispered.
Dörner walked out onto the floor of the chamber and pointed up. “I think that is Xi Virginis.” The circle she indicated was close in to the peak, and Kugara had to revise her sense of scale. The starscape above had to be several times the diameter of known human space. When she stared, she could even see some of the structure of the Milky Way in the stars distributed above her head.
The vastness of what the Dolbrians placed here only highlighted how vast everything else was. Here was a slice of space ten times greater than anywhere humans had ventured, and she could just make out the uneven distribution that marked the boundary of a small part of a spiral arm of the Galaxy.
She stared at the tip of the pyramid, and the small volume marked at the fringe by Xi Virginis; such a tiny area. It made Adam’s claim of godhood laughable. And it made the fate of humanity, and its bastard children like her and Nickolai, irrelevant.
Nickolai whispered, “I now know why the monks feel close to God here.”
“How do you do that?” she asked him.
“Do what?”
“I see this, and all I can think of is how insignificant everything is.”
“We aren’t insignificant,” Nickolai said. “No one is.”
“I just—” she found herself interrupted by the tail end of an argument between Lubikov and Lazarus.
“Are you trying to tell me that this is it?” Lubikov snapped.
“This is the heart of the Ancients’ presence here.” Lazarus said. “You said yourself you can trace what it is we’re protecting.”
Dörner and Brody were looking at each other, as if they were wondering, “Did the Protean actually send us here?”
Kugara looked up at the star map. Could it be pointing somewhere, to something they could use against Adam? If so, they were fucked. She didn’t see any of them getting off of this rock again.
“No, Brother Lazarus,” Lubikov said. “I don’t believe these people were sent for a star map. This is why you’re here, but it’s not what you’re protecting.”
“I assure you—”
Lubikov raised his hand slightly, and the Goliaths moved, pointing their weapons at the monk. The other soldiers in powered armor made a point of stepping away from him. Lubikov stared at the tawny canine and said, quietly, “You are a terrible liar.”
“I can’t—”
“What is that?” Nickolai said, loudly enough to draw attention away from the standoff.
Lubikov turned to face him, “What is what, Mr. Rajasthan ?”
“Brother Lazarus?” Nickolai asked. “Why is the floor where you stand different than the floor where I stand?”
Kugara could see nothing special about where Lazarus stood, but the way the canine turned and glared at Nickolai told her all she needed to know.
“How different?” Lubikov asked.
Nickolai walked up to the standoff, looking down. His alien matte-black eyes gave his face a skull-like appearance in the spotlight’s glare. “It’s very well hidden, almost a mirror of the remaining stone floor. But the temperature is a fraction of a degree warmer.”
One of the solders said, “I don’t see anything in IR.”
Nickolai bent at Lazarus’ feet. “Your equipment is probably not sensitive enough.” He reached out with a finger, extending a hooked black claw, and drew the tip across the floor at the monk’s feet. He traced a razor-straight line in the dust. He continued, walking around, marking the floor, until Lazarus was contained within a perfect pentagon, ten meters on a side, one flat side parallel to and nearly touching the nearest wall.
Nickolai faced that wall. It rose straight up five meters to meet the sloping pyramidal roof. Unlike the rock above them, the wall was unadorned, stretching from the doorway they had entered, to another similar pentagonal opening underneath another vertex of the giant pyramid. Kugara couldn’t see the whole pyramid, but she assumed that it was symmetrical and had a doorway in each corner.
I guess the Dolbrians had a thing for fives.
Nickolai took a few steps, still facing the wall, his back to everyone else. She could tell he was studying the surface, even though there didn’t seem to be any significant variation or irregularity in the blank wall.
She glanced at Brother Lazarus, and it appeared the canine monk was holding his breath. Nickolai was onto something.
The Goliaths swept their spotlights to cover him, causing his orange-and-black fur to stand out brilliantly against his shadow on the wall. Every muscle in his back seemed to be carved in higher relief by the stark light.
She glanced over to Brody and Dörner and tilted her head slightly, making a point to step forward, across the line Nickolai had drawn in the floor and into the pentagon. The two scientists glanced at her, and followed suit.
When he was centered, just inside the wall-facing side of the pentagon, Nickolai grunted slightly. The sound had a satisfied ring to it.
Lazarus said, “Don’t—” while simultaneously Lubikov said, “Wait—”
Then Nickolai touched the wall and the ground fell away beneath her feet.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Benediction
“People will more readily give up their lives than give up their beliefs.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
 
“Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.”
—JOSEPH DE MAISTRE
(1753-1821)
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Father Francis Xavier Mallory stood in a large auditorium in one of the still-intact habitats on the
Wisconsin
. He stood at a podium and faced an audience made largely of holo projections. It reminded him of the classes he’d taught on Occisis.
There were a few flesh-and-blood people here, refugees and staff who hadn’t managed to evacuate, and for whatever reason had yet to leave. The remaining space was crowded by projections from every part of the fleet that remained. Even after the dire losses they had suffered, and after so many had joined the Proteans and left the system, there were enough people in the audience that, had they been real, there would have been no room to breathe.
He faced them from his improvised altar and said, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Other books

Haeven by S. M. Bowles
Burglars Can't Be Choosers by Lawrence Block
Highlander Mine by Miller, Juliette
Puppet On A String by Lizbeth Dusseau
Guilty by Hindle, Joy
Dark Ice by Connie Wood